Really? I found that scene to be pretty disarming.
Anyway, at this point I just don’t care any more what happens to the various characters, except maybe Carl. The others are just too determinedly stupid for me to spare further emotional investment in their fates.
I don’t know. The Governor seems to like his people living blissfully ignorant and comfortible lives while he has his core inner circle (Milton, Merle, Martinez and a handfull of redshirts) do all the dirty work that he needs doing to maintain Woodbury.
I don’t see much “leadership” from Rick at all. Other than just going from one marginally defensible stronghold to the next. And now he’s crazy.
The Governor seems to be becomming a bit unhinged himself. As Milton pointed out, his probing attack on the Prison was mostly posturing. And unless he has some National Guard tanks stashed away somewhere, I’m not sure how 40 or so barely trained suburban townsfolk armed with smallarms are going to storm a fortress surrounded by fields full of zombies.
And did we really need Andrea to go all American History X on a zombie?
Run that by again?
When she curbstomped the walker (after literally disarming it) to break its jaw and make it a “pet”.
And yes, we did need that! 
The Governor may be a villian, but he has a point. “Childhood” no longer exists in any meaningful form, at least not for teenagers. That being said I have alot of doubts about how effective the Woodbury Militia is going to be. At best they’ll get a pyrrhic victory.
Only the nightshift is bloodthirsty, it’s the dayshift people that are soft & clueless.
As mentioned repeatedly, best not to look for plotholes in a show about zombies, but I have wondered where Woodbury found such a large cache of animal control collars (“on a stick”). Most places really don’t have that many of those laying around and I’m guessing Amazon’s no longer running, but Woodbury has a dozen or more of the things.
Another vote for Andrea needs to get et, and not by the Governor.
Stupid writing: Merle quoting the chapter and Bible verse and saying Woodbury had “a fine library”. Dude, the fact they owned a Bible doesn’t put them on par with the NYPL system; I’m guessing your average Econolodge has those in the room.
So where would you rather live if you were an uninformed about the Governor’s insanity citizen: the prison or Woodbury?
I wonder how many libraries Merle has been in, and how often he lies to make a point. 
So if Merle died, his body intact, and became a walker, do you think he’d be able to use armblade when attacking humans? Some seem to be able to do simple strategy (such as using their hands) instead of just walk and bite, so if he accidentally got positive reinforcement by slowing somebody down with his blade-arm I wonder if he’d know to do it again.
Does it seem to anybody else that the walkers are getting to look the worse for wear? I wonder if they have a life expectancy before they fall apart.
Well, I suspect you could find them if you raided an Animal Control office.
Trouble is, the Woodbury community is so small that I find it unlikely in the extreme that the townspeople wouldn’t quickly notice that the Gov is wearing mismatched clown shoes. It’s not like there are layers upon layers of sycophants isolating him from the common people, like George III.
This sort of rationalization is frustrating. The major plot holes are in no way related to zombism. This show has plot holes because it’s poorly written. A decent writer could close the holes (or never open them to begin with) without changing the subject matter.
This was a transition, build-up episode for sure, so I didn’t mind that it was slower. I do mind the continuous use of the non-information sharing as a plot though. Can we please just get everyone up to speed and have good motivations for what people do? Andrea did something interesting: breaking out of Woodbury and into the prison in order to talk to Rick, but that didn’t last long and the talk was kind of just “meh”. Michonne actually getting some lines in this time was great, she needs to talk more, her glowering wore thin 3 or 4 episodes ago.
I find it a little odd that Merle was able to get, even with Daryl’s convincing, free reign of the prison so quickly. They should keep him locked away in one section of the prison, both as a plot device and because I doubt Glenn or Maggie would have put up with him walking around as if he were part of the group. How long did they keep Tyreese’s group in that locked up part?
Speaking of Tyreese, loved how they got to Woodbury and will be a wrinkle in how the whole Rick’s group vs. Governor’s group will play out. I don’t know how its going to play out, but I’m really looking forward to finding out. It looks like they are probably going to tell the Governor how they got into the prison using that back way
I thought it was pretty stupid of the group to just give Andrea a car. Even if they felt it was too dangerous for her to walk all the way back to Woodbury, though she did it the first time with a zombie, they should have at least drove her and dropped her off. They’ve basically given the Governor a free gift, and for someone they didn’t really trust, thought was full of BS, and didn’t want to be part of their group anymore
I was surprised that Andrea didn’t even try to sneak back into Woodbury. She made a big deal about doing the whole thing in secret and needing Milton’s help to leave & get back in. Intead she just drove up to the gate in full view of everybody.
I don’t think that Merle really knows much, if anything, about libraries and their contents.
I thought that it was funny that he could finish the verse.
I thought that the Governor told her not to bother coming back. Maybe my memory is wrong, though…
The funny thing is, the prison group is already living this way. Carl’s already twice the badass fighter most of the Woodbury draftees could ever hope to be.
I hate that stupid, comic-booky lameness of how having a walker near you magically makes you safe from other walkers, but only if you have it in your control with leashes (Michone) or animal control collars (Andrea.) The idiocy of that very concept is a decent example of why comic books get no respect.
Smear zombie guts all over you to mask your smell? Plausible. Clever, even. Have a walker be standing 3-4 feet away from you to mask your smell? Aggressively stupid.
What happens when you’re walking around in the woods and two walkers come at you? Won’t their smell confuse each other? No. They even friggin lampshaded this when Tyrese’s group pointed out that the smell-masker, who was in smell-masking distance at the time, did nothing to slow down the two walkers that showed up and had to be killed.
Apparently the smell is only masked when you are able to control/domesticate them in some way. It just offends me, probably way more than it should. When such “cool, neato!” elements are introduced that clearly make no sense, I feel like I’m consuming entertainment meant for 6 year olds.
Just to be perfectly clear, the smell-masking by proximity alone (as opposed to physically smearing guts all over yourself) would make a massive herd, like the one that overran the farm, the safest possible place you could be. In a large herd there should be zero possible chance to be attacked if that stupid contrivance of smell-masking-by-proximity was effective.
Agreed.
That’s why Dale’s sermonizing always grated on me, clinging to a reality that no longer existed. To the point that he’d much rather die from his delusions than accept what reality had become. Maybe it annoyed me so much because it reminded me (an atheist) of the mindset of zealots.
Woodbury is kinda like the USS Voyager - kill off a few nameless background characters every week to prove the situation is serious, but the overall population remains constant.
I thought this ep was kinda lame, and, as mentioned above, the American History X-esque curbstomping tripped me out. First thing I thought of. Maybe the writers didn’t snap to the resemblance to the movie. Or maybe they did.
This ep was confusing. But then again, you can’t attribute normal thinking amongst people as to how they think in such a surreal post-apocalyptic environment.
Everybody has to be a little bit crazy, right? Imagine dealing with zombies every day for a few years. It will really be a trip if the zombies learn how to run :eek:
Wait a second…
Yup, I see what you did there
I agree that the above is probably what the show is trying to portray, but it’s undermined by Rick’s non-leadership and the decision to make The Governor increasingly unhinged. Insane characters are always the least effective and interesting ones in fiction, it’s a terrible plot device.
Right, using them as a strike force is foolish, but every person in Woodbury should be trained to defend themselves and the town. It’s a hardscrabble world out there. I don’t think there would actually be much objection to teaching a 14 year old with asthma to shoot.
You might be on to something, I wonder if they’re using the same extras.
There seems to be a lot of individual variation, we saw one walker recognize a revolver as a threat and put it away from its face, and another revisit the house where it’d stayed as a human; others seem to lack any sort of reasoning power. So, it depends on how much thinking zombie Merle was capable of.
Someone in an earlier thread posted an item about how the sxf team was making the zombies look more and more rotted, but now I can’t seem to find it.
I thought it was in character for her, entitled arrogance is her thing.
You’re right, he did.
Agreed, and further, the LAST thing the show needs is another way to make the walkers non-threatening. They have posed less and less of a threat as the show has gone on, they are more like ambulatory rotting pumpkins than ravenous monsters at this point. The only legitimate threat one posed this season occured when Glenn was tied to a chair.
When the zombies aren’t particularly dangerous, it makes the inter-human fighting less believeable. Rick and co should just leave the prison, and set up in a waste treatment plant or factory two counties over. The Governor is far more dangerous than the zombies.